Bangladesh

TRANSPORTATION AND COMMUNICATIONS

A load of earthen pots on a country boat headed downriverCourtesy Bangladesh Ministry of Information

Figure 10. Transportation System, 1988

Inland Waterways and Ports

The primary transportation system of Bangladesh is its
extensive inland waterways. Some 18.9 million tons of cargo (about
21 percent of the total) were moved by water transportation in FY
1986. As of early 1988, the country had 8,430 kilometers of
navigable waterways, of which up to 3,058 were main cargo routes.
There are seasonal difficulties in the navigability of rivers and
canals for the traditional country boats that constitute the great
bulk of the merchant fleet, but geography and history have made
these craft the preferred means of moving goods between the ports
on the Bay of Bengal and the interior and between surplus and
shortage regions of the country. As of 1987, the Bangladesh Inland
Water Transport Corporation operated a fleet of more than 480
vessels; about half were inland and river barges, and the rest were
used for coastal trade. The size of the corporation's fleet had
been steadily declining over the years, but they still represented
a substantial portion of the registered watercraft.

The total number of passenger- and cargo-carrying country boats
plying the vast river system was nearly 300,000 and was increasing
in the mid-1980s. Some of the larger boats use a single sail to
supplement manpower. The larger boats carry loads up to thirty-five
tons and operate with crews of three or more. Generally, they are
built with a raised platform at the stern of the vessel, on which
a man patiently walks back and forth with a large-paddled oar,
while others may pole in the shallow water or row from the sides.
At times, the boats are pulled with ropes from along the shore.
These boats have a shallow draft, necessary for navigating in the
extensive but very shallow river system. When loaded, the boats sit
low in the water. Cargoes of raw jute or logs from the mangrove
forest of the Sundarbans may fill all the interior space and
project beyond the gunwales of the boat itself. Other cargoes may
be bagged or covered with cloth or bamboo meshwork. Country boats
are estimated to move more than 17 million tons of cargo yearly, on
a system of at least 1,400 launch landings and the major river
ports of Dhaka, Narayanganj, Chandpur, Barisal, and Khulna. Country
boats are unsuited for the Bay of Bengal or the broad Padma-Meghna
estuary. Thus coastal traffic of bulk agricultural goods is much
smaller than inland waterway traffic.

Traditional and modern means of water transportation meet at
the seaports of Chittagong and Chalna, where most of Bangladesh's
imports and exports are transferred between dramatically different
kinds of vessels
(see River Systems
, ch. 2;
fig. 10). The
government-owned Bangladesh Shipping Corporation reportedly had
twenty-one oceangoing ships in its inventory in 1986, and the ships
of many other nations called at the major ports. Chittagong, the
principal port, has an excellent natural harbor and anchorage on
the Karnaphuli River, about five kilometers from the Bay of Bengal.
The port facilities were developed after 1947, and by 1970
Chittagong could berth 20 ships at a time and handle 4 million tons
of cargo annually. In FY 1985, the port at Chittagong handled some
1,086 vessels and 6.2 million tons of cargo. Chalna is on the Pusur
River about sixty-four kilometers south of the river port city of
Khulna. Chalna was still being developed in the late 1980s, but it
was rapidly gaining on Chittagong in capacity and in traffic,
particularly as land and inland waterway connections also were
being improved to reorient the distribution system of the west and
northwest areas of the country to the newer port. The port at
Chalna handled 545 vessels and 2.3 million tons of cargo in FY
1985.